I downloaded the Netscape 7 preview release yesterday (it's already been downloaded 1.4 million times on download.com) and played with it for a little bit. One thing you immediately notice is that it starts up about 200x faster than 6.x. I remember starting up N6.0 the first time and waiting...and waiting...and waiting. I thought there was something wrong with my computer. Well, they corrected that problem...in it's place, they've introduce more (in my opinion). The main reason I probably won't be using N7 for anything other than qa purposes is simply b/c they make it too hard for me to simply surf the web. The first few times you use it, you're pestered to death to sign up for netscape, sign up for their mail, and then they try to cram AOL and Ne2Phone down your throat (net2phone?? Have you ever used that? It sucks!). I loathe AOL, and the fact that it is plastered everywhere in the netscape browser is a huge turnoff. But maybe that's their plan...maybe they only wish for their millions and millions of AOL subscribers to use N7. I can't imagine that's the case though, b/c even with all those millions it's still a drop in the bucket compared to IE's reach. And isn't that the real target?

All that aside, at least they seem to be moving away from proprietary netscape garbage and more toward the center of web standards. It seems to be primarily a mozilla build from earlier this year, and seemed to be doing a pretty good job of displaying all the sites I went to. The only one I had a problem with was my admin screen for greymatter (where I'm writing this)...it wouldn't even load it. Go figure. One thing I would like to know is what the usage rate is on those icons they place at the top of the bottom of the toolbar. I'm sure "home" gets a lot of use...and maybe even "search" and "bookmarks," but what about the others. Is Net2Phone really worth having up there? Are they paying millions of dollars to be featured there? I'm surprised browsers haven't started selling scrolling text messages at the top or something.

I think N7 definitely made some good progress, but it's still pretty much irrelevant until they have more than 5-10% of total users. And by the way, that's not likely to happen when AOL does make the switch to N7 and forces their legion of users to adopt it. Why? Because all this time AOL has forced their users to use IE all this time...that's right, they've created a strong brand relationship for MS with all those users for the last several years. They're used to using IE. If you're already using AOL, then chances are you don't like a lot of change when it comes to your web surfing. And now that as many as 60% of AOL's users plan to leave the service within a year, none of those users are going to want to make the switch to something like netscape. Worse than that, when they leave a great majority of them are poised to end up at rival MSN, where they'll be using IE anyway. Who wants to bet we don't see a N8?